This article examines the problem of the chasm between Zionist ideology, Jewish cultural reality in interwar Poland, and the praxis of Zionist education of this period, manifested in the activities of the Tarbut school network. According to the Zionist idea of monocultural nationalism, the process of acculturation to which interwar Polish Jewry was subjected was conceived as assimilation, which threatened the possibility of the existence of Hebrew culture and Zionist activities in the diaspora. In this article I present reactions to acculturation (or assimilation) through the prism of the polemic of Polish- and Erets Yisrael–based ideologues and educators and through the dissonance between Tarbut educational ideology and praxis, as manifested in the Hebrew educational journal Ofakim, in other publications, and in school programs. I also analyze recollections of Tarbut pupils, their educational experiences, and accounts of how they were perceived in those schools.

This article presents two pioneering religious Jewish schools that opened their doors to girls in Jerusalem in the first decade and a half after the end of World War I and the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine. One of these schools, established by Chana Shpitzer, was exclusively for girls, while the other, Maʿaleh, was coeducational. Although both schools were Orthodox in outlook and identified with the growing Zionist movement, their approaches to Torah education for girls were quite different. I believe a comparison between these two schools offers some insights into the relative advantages and disadvantages of single-sex and mixed Jewish educational frameworks.

Studies of Jewish students in Palestine’s Christian missionary schools largely end at the close of the Ottoman period. But although a tiny and diminishing fraction of Jewish students studied in such schools after the First World War, the mandate period was marked by anxious and often zealous Zionist anti-missionary campaigns. The article considers this space of Jewish-Christian interaction, arguing that even as a Hebrew-dominant society took root, missionary schools provided education in European languages, particularly English, tools that offered advantages to Jewish students with an interest in clerical work or foreign study. The continuing appeal and importance of foreign language skills cast doubt on the Zionist pretence of a self-sufficient Hebrew society.

Different concepts about the direction of Jewish society and culture in Eretz Israel converged around the issue of education in the moshavot of Ottoman Palestine. Parents in the moshavot had three educational alternatives to consider and choose from: the religious-traditional, modern French-language, and modern-Zionist options. The religious alternative was a continuation of the heder or Talmud-Torah. The other two options were an expression of the desire to create a modern Jew. The one aspired to mold a modern, observant Jew with a Western cultural orientation. The other sought to forge a modern, Jewish, Eretz-Yisraeli society conducted in Hebrew. The community philanthropy provided by Baron Rothschild and the JCA allowed the modern alternatives to set up schools that operated alongside other community institutions. The schools in Ottoman Palestine, like those in some of the countries of nineteenth-century Europe, were major, vitally important institutions in their communities. They gave the younger generation a basis for their professional futures and dealt with public–social–cultural issues that no other public system handled. A notable example of this was the problem of hygiene. The moshavah school, like its European counterparts, predated the development of social work.86 It served as a substitute for hospitals, which were not easily reached, and took care of the entire juvenile population, including and mainly those without means. This process, set in motion by the advent of compulsory education laws, gradually spread throughout Europe and America, and transformed the school into a major, accessible institution. The modern-French language schools and the modern Zionist schools were easily incorporated into the communal philanthropic model. Community life in the moshavot, as in European farming communities, made the school’s educational efforts—beyond those of teaching and expanding knowledge—easier.

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From the historical perspective it may be argued that Zionist education triumphed over the ethnic solidarity of Jewish philanthropy. This success may be attributed, inter alia, to the Hebrew teachers’ ability to organize themselves and create an educational establishment that included uniform curriculum, teaching aids, and pedagogical standards. These teachers were able to take advantage of the educational philanthropy and emphasize the ideology they had in common with it while guiding the schools to develop a Hebrew culture and a modern, Jewish, Eretz-Yisraeli society.